Two Princes and a Queen
Page 44
The men from the Kladovo group who remained in Sabac after March 1941 were murdered in October 1941, within a space of three days. They were methodically slaughtered by SS firing squads, by order of General Franz Böhme. The shooting was recorded by a company of soldiers whose role was to record and document the actions of the German unit operating there. The picture appears at the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem, and at the Topography of Terror Museum in Berlin. The killing was carried out in Farmer Ivanowich’s corn field, above ditches dug by Jewish prisoners and the gypsies themselves, under the threat of SS guns. The farm was near Zasavica, a village on the banks of the Sava.
The women from the Kladovo group were taken from the camp near Sabac on the infamous women’s march that left on January 10, 1942, for nearby Článek. From there, they were brought to Ruma on a cattle train. From Ruma, they continued through the frozen snow, exhausted, their shoes in tatters, as far as Zemun on the outskirts of Belgrade, a distance of about thirty kilometers. Among them were mothers with babes in arms, some forced to leave them in the snow, in the hope they’d be able to return for them.
All the women perished at the Sajmište camp in the recurring journeys of the Saurer polizei, the soul killer, carried out between March and May 1942.
The Kladovo group consisted of 1,140 men, women, and children who were attempting to reach Eretz Israel before the appalling wave of terror sweeping Europe drowned them too. The door was closed in their faces and they were lost.
Only two hundred and fifty youth were saved from this hell—those fortunate enough to be the right age to board the freedom train that left Sabac for Atlit, via Bulgaria, Greece, Constantinople, and Beirut.
The Kladovo Affair continued to trouble the waters many years later in Eretz Israel. These were the political waters of the leaders of the Jewish Agency and the Mossad L’Aliyah Bet, who tried to evade accountability for the complications that brought about the searing failure to bring the group safely to Eretz Israel.